John Dewey and American Psychology

Abstract

Indeed, Dewey was powerfully influenced by Darwin and was a strong advocate of "experiment," and he often spoke not only of "the mind in use" but also of "control" (Hickman, 1992). But while Dewey was a leading voice in Progressive thought, it is easy to demonstrate that he was a strenuous critic of the sort of scientism so well expressed in the text cited from Leahy (Manicas, 1988; Westbrook, 1991). And, it was easy, but wrong, to think that the differences between positivism and variant forms pragmatism were of little importance to the idea of a "scientific psychology" (Manicas, 1998). Finally, Dewey was committed to an empirical approach to mind and did reject dualist psychology, but his "instrumentalism" was no positivism. Indeed, it is not difficult to show that he played nearly no role in the development of mainstream American psychology. Part I of this essay addresses these confusions. It requires providing a reconstruction of the development of American psychology, if only in sketchy fashion, assaying what Dewey actual did and said, and clarifying some key concepts.What, then of the second irony? Although as I shall argue, Dewey had great hopes for "the new psychology," and, early on in his career, identified himself as a psychologist, he abandoned psychology and came to believe that it ill served what became his primary intellectual goal, that philosophy must address not the problems of philosophy, but the problems of humankind. While he continued to argue that "the nature of all objects of philosophical inquiry is to be fixed by finding out what experience has to say about them," instead of getting answers from "scientific psychology," the problems he was interested in addressing would respond to a new conception of inquiry, work which culminated in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. This profound shift is missed primarily because Dewey's theory of inquiry is so fundamentally in opposition to the dominating logical empiricist theory of science, which had by then captured psychology, that it was misunderstood and then ignored. The second irony then is this: Having abandoned even the more refined forms of behaviorism, the cutting edge of current work in psychology is so-called "cognitive psychology." But, remarkably, not only does Dewey's Logic give us prophetic insights into the most fruitful of these approaches, an ecologically oriented, biologically grounded cognitive science, but shows us decisively why "symbolic" AI models must fail. One wonders whether Dewey will be ill served once again. Part II addresses these complicated issues.

Plans, Takes, and Mis-takes

“…Dewey's is not the only twentieth century celebration of the relentless temporality of human activities, 3 but its elegance is getting now appreciated (Sleeper, 1986;Hickman, 1992;Burke, 1994;Manicas, 1998Manicas, /2008. John McDermott says that Dewey offers "a metaphysics of transiency, in which human life is seen as a wandering, a traveling, a bemusement which rocks side to side, comedy and tragedy, breakthrough and setback -yet, in all, a purposive, even progressive, trip" (2007, p. 157).…”

Dewey’s neglected psychology: Rediscovering his transactional approach

“…Several interpretations of Dewey (e.g., Burke, 1994;Manicas, 2002) see him as having paved the way for an ecological tradition within psychology. This also goes for pragmatism more broadly (Heft, 2001).…”

There is no “point” in decision-making: a model of transactive rationality for public policy and administration

“…Pragmatist scholars caution against interpreting Dewey's logic of inquiry as a method of scientific experiment (Hickman 1995;Manicas 2002). The term ''experimental'' does not capture Dewey's integrated view of what is ''experiential,'' i.e., the mutually formative transactions of agents and conditions in situations.…”